ABSTRACT
Part II of the book has mainly been concerned with aggregation over individual consumers. In doing this, we have concentrated on one side of the market, namely the demand side, and aggregation took place over the demand for a certain good, not on the realized consumption of that good. Of course, one could assume that demand for and realized consumption of a good coincide. 1 In economic terms this would imply the assumption that the supply of the good is larger than or equal to the demand for that good. In a combined analysis of the aggregation of the supply of and the demand for goods such an identification of terms would imply the assumption that supply equals demand. This assump-tion of market clearing (or, more narrowly, of competitive equilibrium) 2 is often made in economic analysis. An interesting question then is whether this assumption can be derived from the interaction of ration-ally behaving individuals. This is the subject of the present chapter.
